Chantal and Kenneth talk to Grant Ongers and Mike Davis about infosec and the local BSides conference in Cape Town.Grant and Mike are part of the organizing team behind BSides in Cape Town, and both love working in the infosec space. BSides here is based on, and supported by, the BSides conference in Las Vegas. BSides originated as a community ...…

We chat to Louise Perold about testing as a means to improve the overall quality of software, and the upcoming Let's Test conferenceKenneth & Len chat to Louise Perold about the art & practice of software testing. Louise reframes testing in a wonderful light, and how testers compliment and support the existing software development efforts. Ther ...…

We chat to Inez, Ridhwana & Lara about the Ladies that UX communities in Cape Town, and as of today Johannesburg.Chantal, Kenneth & Kevin are joined by the dynamic trio of Inez Patel, Ridhwana Khan & Lara Pietersen to talk about UX and the local Ladies that UX meetups in Cape Town and now Johannesburg.User Experience (UX) is an integral part of ...…

We chat to Jade Abbott from Retro Rabbit about artificial intelligence, broadly and more specifically about NLP and what that means for us.Chantal, Kenneth & Len talk to Jade about natural language processing, commonly referred to as NLP. What does it take to get a machine to understand what we're saying as people?Jade has always had a fascinat ...…

We talk to Ruddy Riba about her career as a women in tech, and Pink-IT and what they are doing to help women in tech find a supportive community and grow their networks.Chantal, Kenneth & Len talk to Ruddy about some of the challenges woman in technology face, and what she and her partners in Pink-IT are doing to help get women into tech.Ruddy ...…

We talk to Clarice Bouwer about imposter syndrome, what it is and how to overcome it. Join us as we learn about this and other issues around the often overlooked topics of mental well-being.Chantal & Kenneth talk to Clarice Bouwer. Clarice started the Corporate Programmer blog as a survival guide for her work in a big corporate environment, and ...…

We talk to Gail Shaw about data, in all its shapes and sizes. Gail is a 10 year Microsoft MVP, and has tamed many a database in her career and shares some great insights with us.Chantal, Kenneth & Len talk data with Gail Shaw. From Gail's first 8086 PC, dual majoring in physics & computer science and printed Oracle error codes we join Gail on h ...…

We talk to Tim Haak about playing with wifi networks covering large parts of Gauteng, and running Docker in production, and how to sanely get started with conquering containers.Kenneth & Kevin chat to Tim about Docker, what it is, how its evolving and how to sanely start packaging your apps in containers for shipping.Heads up! There were some a ...…

We talk to Lance Gleason of Polyglot Programming about the software, embeddable devices, biltong and how the local community stacks up against the rest of the world.Chantal, Kenneth & Kevin chat to Lance about his involvement with the South African tech community. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, Lance has definitely made a name for himself in variou ...…

We talk to Quentin Harley, the "crazy inventor" behind the locally built Morgan 3D PrintersThis episode is brought to you by OfferZen, a South African recruitment startup for developers. OfferZen inverts the normal recruitment process. Instead of applying for jobs, 350 tech companies in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria, send developers inte ...…

We talk to Kevin Trethewey about his history and building up Driven Alliance and putting people before technology.This episode is brought to you by OfferZen, a South African recruitment startup for developers. OfferZen inverts the normal recruitment process. Instead of applying for jobs, 350 tech companies in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretori ...…

Live from DevConf 2017! Four conversations on the day.This episode is brought to you by OfferZen, a South African recruitment startup for developers. OfferZen inverts the normal recruitment process. Instead of applying for jobs, 350 tech companies in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria, send developers interview requests with upfront salary in ...…

We venture out into Python country only to discover a healthy, diverse and growing community.This episode is brought to you by OfferZen, a South African recruitment startup for developers. OfferZen inverts the normal recruitment process. Instead of applying for jobs, 350 tech companies in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria, send developers in ...…

From the importance of pet projects to organizing conferences, come join us as we learn a metric ton from a friend of many developers.Chantal, Kenneth, Kevin & Len are joined by Simon Stewart for a journey through his career as a developer. Simon is a respected and loved figure in many tech communities and arguably best known for organizing the ...…

What can we teach machines? And what can they teach us?Chantal, Kenneth & Len are joined by Guillaume Belrose to chat broadly about machine learning. Guillaume is currently living in Johannesburg, but hails from the Caribbean. After having studied in France he went onto an internship at HP in Bristol, before moving to Durban and finally up to t ...…

Join us for a walk down memory lane as we retrace the start of the Ruby community in Johannesburg and end up on the trails of the Aosta Valley.Kenneth & Kevin chat with Armand du Plessis, a long-time Rubyist about his journey from classic ASP to being the CTO of Hornet. We get a small glimpse into life before .net and building applications for ...…

In this age of containers and virtualization, are we losing touch with hardware and the raw performance available to us?Kenneth chats to Kevin & Len about our current understanding of hardware performance and if it matters in this age of containers and virtualization.Spawned by an article on Non-uniform Memory Access in modern multi-CPU archite ...…

Thinking of a bootcamp as "a series of long conversations" and other gems from teaching software craftsmanship.Kenneth & Len are joined by Mike Hewitson for a talk on the developer bootcamps that Mike helps to facilitate at Investec.Mike shares with us his journey from the army, to the railways, and how he got onto the financial services line. ...…

We reach over the proverbial cubicle wall and chat with the testers!Kenneth, Kevin & Len are joined by Janco Wolmarans and Oz Chihwayi to talk about their experiences of having software testers integrated into a multi-functional software delivery team.Oz shares with us how he went from running batch processes during the graveyard shift to becom ...…

We turn 50!Frolicking (verb) - to gambol merrily; to play in a frisky, light-spirited manner. From the Dutch, vrolijk.Kenneth, Kevin & Len are joined by former panelists Steven McDonald and Pieter Germishuys for a look back at the origin of the podcast, the past 50 episodes and the future of our founding team.From the humble beginnings of just ...…

What poor development practices get under your skin?In the episode Kenneth, Kevin & Len unpack a few poor software development practices that they've seen over and over again.More or less in order they tackled long-lived branches in version control, having too many automated tests, being too reliant on your IDE, copying the first answer from St ...…

What happens when your database is part of your application?Kenneth & Len are joined once again by Robert Stuttaford from Cognician to talk about Datomic. According to the Datomic website, Datomic is a distributed database designed to enable scalable, flexible and intelligent applications, running on next-generation cloud architectures.Robert s ...…

Join us for a tale of conquering software development as we follow one young star on his journey to taming React.Tonight Kenneth, Kevin & Len are joined by Taariq Isaacs to talk about his journey as a software developer and how he tamed React. Taariq started off his journey at CPUT in their Mechatronics course, a branch of electrical engineerin ...…

We're joined again by Rishal Hurbans to chat about his Prolific Idea initiative, how it came to be, what it currently does and where it's going.We talk about the X-Prize Learning Challenge and the importance of letting kids learn while they're having fun. Kevin and Kenneth reminisce about Sesame Street, Cartoon Network and learning numeracy in ...…

Join us as we look into our crystal ball to see what is coming in the next major release of the popular Angular framework.Kenneth & Len are joined by Mike Geyser from BBD to talk about the upcoming Angular 2 release. Mike has been a web developer for many years, having uploaded websites to Geocities back in the day! The web has changed a lot si ...…

Taking a hard look at accessibility and learning about the principles of inclusive design.Kenneth & Len are joined by Steve Barnett and Justin Slack to talk about building accessible frontends. We quickly learn that building an accessible website doesn't always mean catering for people with permanent disabilities. We learn about inclusive desig ...…

Shall we play a game? We dive into artificial intelligence and bots, and their battle for the the ultimate prize.Kenneth & Kevin are joined by Tomislav Ravic, Rishal Hurbans & Hennie Brink from Entelect to talk about the Entelect Challenge and artificial intelligence. The Entelect Challenge is the annual AI vs AI bot challenge. Players can win ...…

We're having another chat about computing education in the country, this time with a special guest from Durban who is looking to help change the country for the better.Kenneth & Kevin are joined by Riaz Moola from HyperionDev and the Computer Science Association of South Africa (CSASA) to talk about teaching programming online. Riaz is an accom ...…

Does infrastructure as code pave the way for repeatable, reliable, consistent and testable infrastructure? Join us as we found out.Kenneth, Kevin & Len are joined by Charlene Tshitoka from ThoughtWorks for a talk about infrastructure as code. Charlene has often gravitated towards the infrastructure of software projects, and after having worked ...…

Kevin and Len are joined by Simon Stewart to discuss the Swift programming language from Apple. Swift is a modern object oriented programming language intended to supersede Objective-C as the standard language in an Apple developer's toolbox.We talk about some of the quirks in Apple's developer ecosystem before unpacking some of the interesting ...…

Kenneth, Kevin and Len are joined by Rebecca Franks to discuss the world of mobile development for Android, Google's developer platform and her recent Google Developer Expert accolade.We take a dive into all things Android, starting with the Play Store and the impact that's made on the app ecosystem before going into the more technical details ...…

We tackle the testy topic of automated testing in the life of software projects.Kenneth & Len are joined by Joshua Lewis from nReality (formerly of the JCSE) about the ins and outs of automated testing. We tear through artificial boundaries to unpack the value of testing, as well as potential pitfalls. There are many different testing tools and ...…

We tackle data visualization in its full technicolor glory!Kenneth, Kevin & Len are joined by Jeff Fletcher from IS Research & Innovation to talk about data visualization. Jeff has been working in the internet business for quite some time, from JINX to Telkom, Antfarm to IS, UUNet to 365 and finally back to R&I at Internet Solutions. We met Jef ...…

In this weeks episode we share the inspirational story of two developers that have devoted themselves to teaching the disadvantaged youth of two prominent townships, Diepsloot and Olievenhoutbosch, to program.We chat to Theo Bohnen (https://twitter.com/tbohnenjnr) and Mandla Magagula (https://twitter.com/mandlamag) about their Sisonke Rising in ...…

In this episode Kenneth turns the table on Kevin and chats about a recent successful migration between clouds and architectures.Kevin and his team at Platform45 recently migrated a well established application (www.resourceguruapp.com) from AWS and EngineYard to Google Container Engine. This was a non-trivial migration from a managed platform a ...…

The ZADevChat crew attended the inaugural installation of DevConf recently and recorded some of the action for our listeners. This episode is made up of live recordings throughout the day as we caught up with attendees, speakers and the conference organisers.If you want to hear more of the backstory to DevConf, pick up Episode 23 where we spoke ...…

We're getting up to speed with the fascinating world of web frontend performance. Concatenation, compression, optimization and more delivered in one speedy package this week!Kenneth, Kevin & Len are joined by Mannuel Ferreira, a web designer and developer from Superbalist.com. Mannuel shares with us some practical experiences he's had at his cu ...…

We get to work understanding the world of PHP, that scripting language that runs the vast majority of the internet. Is it more than just Wordpress? Join us as we find out!Kevin & Len are joined by Etienne Marais, a senior PHP developer at Superbalist. Before moving to Cape Town, we met Etienne at the Johannesburg Laravel User meetup that he was ...…

Join us as we explore 12 Factor applications and the Polarbear JavaScript scaffold.Kenneth & Kevin chat to Ben Janecke about his Polarbear scaffold for generating 12 Factor applications using node. The scaffold provides users with a React frontend (with server rendering to boot!) and an Express API. We spend a decent amount of time chatting abo ...…

Kenneth and Kevin have the first of our Segfault instalments, a monthly banter about things that we find noteworthy but that might not fill an episode (yet).Here are the links to the (majority of the) topics we covered:* Rubyfuza 2016 - http://www.rubyfuza.org/* DevConf ZA 2016, covered on #23 - http://www.devconf.co.za* Go 1.6 release, specifi ...…

We get to work to make sense of a sensemaking framework for human work systems, and learn how to build stronger teams with better communication.Kenneth & Kevin are joined by Danie Roux (@danieroux) & Kevin Trethewey (@KevinTrethewey) to chat about their Spine model, a sensemaking framework for human systems. Danie & Kevin are both involved in d ...…

We cross borders into the world of physical computing to chat about hardware hacking at House4Hack.Kenneth, Kevin & Len are joined by Toby Kurien (@TobyKurien), one of the early founders of House4Hack, a maker space in Centurion, and chat about Raspberry PI, Arduino, hacking telescopes, sub-orbital flight (ok, not really), home automation and l ...…

Join us as we explore Clojure, the robust, practical and fast programming language.Kenneth, Kevin & Len talk to Robert Stuttaford (@RobStuttaford), co-founder and CTO of Cognician, about the Clojure programming language and his experience using it for the last few years. We discuss the language itself as well as some tools. We sing the praises ...…

In this episode we explore the local world of open data and civic hacking.Kenneth, Kevin and Len are joined by Jason Norwood-Young (@j_norwood_young) from Code4SA (@Code4SA). Jason was a tech journalist in a previous life and "converted to the dark side" to become a developer. He's currently working with Code4SA on various open data and civic h ...…

In this episode we explore the world of indie game development.Kenneth and Kevin are joined by Sean Goncalves (@The_Son_of_Wolf) and Ben Myres (@_benjamming) from Nyamakop (@_Nyamakop), makers of independent games in Braamfontein, Johannesburg.We touch on the difference between "AAA" and "indie" games, tools of the trade, the experiences of rel ...…

In this episode we turn the spotlight on the Rust programming language.Kevin has been dabbling with it recently and shares his experience of exploring what Rust has to offer."Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety" - rust-lang.org Len and Kevin pick apart some of languag ...…

Kevin, Len & Kenneth chat to Robert Maclean (https://twitter.com/rmaclean) about the first DevConf ZA (http://www.devconf.co.za) happening on the 8th of March 2016 at the Riversands Conference Venue in Johannesburg.Important dates:Mid-January 2016 - Ticket Sales Open18 January - CFP closes8 March - Conference dayThis one day multi-track confere ...…

Seasons greetings from Kenneth, Kevin & Len!Thanks for all the support in 2015. Enjoy the break and spending time with loved ones, travel safe!We'll be back early in the new year!"Christmas Rap" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/…